Teaching Law and War: Some Reflections on Justice and Pedagogy
Teaching Law and War within a Politics and International Relations department is both rewarding and unsettling. It sits at the intersection of two disciplines that often speak past each other — law with its faith in rules, and politics with its realism about power. Each year, students come into the classroom already engaged with global injustice. They bring with them the images, headlines, and debates surrounding Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and beyond, and they want to know: what can international law actually do?
That question often arrives steeped in disappointment — a sense that institutions like the ICC, ICJ, and UN Security Council have failed to deliver justice or accountability. I try not to resolve that tension for them. Instead, I ask that we hold it open and examine what lies beneath it. What does it mean to say law has “failed”? What work do these institutions perform even when their enforcement capacity is weak? What can law tell us about how power legitimises itself — or how it is resisted?
My own research informs how I approach these questions. I focus on international law and global security governance, with a particular focus on arms control, responsibility, and the role of the United Nations in constructing norms of restraint. Working with legal and diplomatic archives has shown me how treaties, resolutions, and verification regimes are not fixed moral codes but evolving political artefacts — products of compromise, shaped as much by power and rivalry as by idealism. Yet they also reveal moments of principled imagination, where law becomes a language through which states and individuals try to articulate justice, restraint, or peace. Bringing that research perspective into the classroom helps students see law as a living, negotiated practice rather than a static set of rules.
Pedagogically, I think it’s helpful — if not vital — to begin with the legal architecture that emerged from Nuremberg: a formative moment in the pursuit of justice, accountability, and the development of humanitarian law. This includes the Geneva Conventions, the post-war definitions of genocide and crimes against humanity shaped by figures such as Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, and the historical context in which their ideas took form. As Philippe Sands shows in East West Street (one I recommend for your reading list!), these categories were never purely legal abstractions — they grew from lived experience, from grief, displacement, and the desire to name suffering as a crime.
I try to keep that human thread alive in my teaching. One of the readings I'd also share is — Looking at Women Looking at War by Victoria Amelina — which captures this profoundly. Amelina, who was killed before she could complete the book, reflects on witnessing and documenting war crimes in Ukraine. Her words remind students that justice is not only procedural but deeply ethical — grounded in the courage to see, record, and remember.
From there, we move into more experimental classroom exercises. We stage a “Trial of International Law,” where students act as prosecution and defence, to debate whether law is truly “law” without enforcement. In another session, we simulate a UN Security Council meeting, allowing students to inhabit the messy interplay of diplomacy, interest, and moral claim-making. Later in the semester, we examine Truth Commissions and People’s Tribunals to consider how justice can emerge outside formal institutions.
Through these exercises, students begin to see and be able to articulate in their own words that law is not a single, stable entity but a collection of practices, performances, and meanings. Even when it fails to prevent atrocity, it offers a grammar for judgement — a way to name violence, record it, and insist that it matters. The ethics of war, then, extend beyond conduct on the battlefield to the moral work of remembering and giving meaning to harm.
Many students still view international law as limited or ineffective, yet they also come to recognise that law operates in different registers — symbolic, ethical, political. Justice, too, can mean different things and still be both affective and effective: a feeling, a process, a demand. As a teacher, I find that recognition powerful. It allows us to hold together disappointment and possibility — to see that even when law falters, the act of naming injustice still matters.
Dr Tegan Harrison is a University Teacher in Politics and International Relations at Cardiff University. Her research explores arms control, responsibility, and the politics of international law at the United Nations.
